1905 Movie Network Special Article May 1st is coming, and the pre-sale box office (including screenings) of new films in the schedule is nearly 150 million mark! Among them, "The Siege of the Kowloon Walled City", "Peacekeeping Anti-riot Team", and "Spy Playing House Codename: White" are temporarily among the top three at the current pre-sale box office. This was followed by another animated film, Hayao Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle.
Judging from the current market situation alone, Japanese animated films will once again become the "top students" in the market. Many viewers are no strangers to "Howl's Moving Castle", coupled with the brand effect of "Hayao Miyazaki", and with the help of the residual heat of "What kind of life do you want to live" in the Qingming file, it is not surprising that the film can have this result.
It's just that many viewers aged 30+ seem to be relatively unfamiliar with another animated movie "Spy Playing Home", and if you look carefully at the number of people who want to watch the film on different platforms, the post-00s audience accounts for more than 6 percent. Similar to its audience, it is another Japanese animated film "Volleyball Boy!!" currently scheduled for June 15.
This data is in great contrast to the audience of the animated film "Slam Dunk" released last year, which accounts for less than 20% of the post-00s audience. Perhaps in contrast to the two, we can also get a glimpse of people of different generations having their own preferred anime IPs.
Nowadays, Japanese animation is frequently introduced, in addition to the "Detective Conan" series, the "Doraemon" series and the Chinese audience have an agreement of "one issue and one meeting", there are also surprises from other IPs, but we are also curious, what age audience are these anime IPs attracting?
Note: The Japanese anime IPs mentioned below are all theatrical animated films based on the TV version of the anime series or manga format, and derived from the TV version of the IP. At the same time, it also includes "Doraemon: Walk with Me" series, "Slam Dunk" and other animated films based on animation IP and relatively independently developed. Therefore, it does not involve original animated films produced by Hayao Miyazaki and Makoto Shinkai.
01. Fixed preference for age groups
What is the origin of the anime "Spy Playing Home"?
Created by manga artist Tatsuya Endo, the original book "SPY×FAMILY" has been serialized on the webtoon platform Jump+ since 2019, and has published 13 episodes of single books so far, with cumulative sales of more than 25 million copies. The story tells the story of a man who is a spy, a woman who is actually a killer, and a girl with superpowers, who hide their identities from each other and form a special temporary family.
Since the story was animated in 2022, it has received a lot of attention, among which the image of the soft and cute girl Ania is very popular. After the animated series was introduced to the Chinese video platform, it also attracted the love of many two-dimensional audiences, not only appeared more second-creation videos on station B, but also appeared in the cosplay of many fans at the comic exhibition.
uses a data to prove that the animated series still won more than 100 million broadcasts in 22 days on the platform despite the delayed broadcast, breaking the highest record set by another Japanese comic "Jujutsu Kaisen" in 2020. So far, the number of ratings on Douban has exceeded 180,000, far exceeding the number of ratings of many Japanese animations - another super-popular "Demon Slayer: Infinite Train Chapter" in the past has only a few more than 100,000 ratings.
Another animated film mentioned at the beginning of the article, "Volleyball Boy!!Dump Showdown", has a similar situation. It's just that the animation IP was animated as early as 2014, and it has also gained a group of post-90s and post-00s fans on the domestic video platform.
Perhaps, the core audience condensed by animation IP can provide a strong preparation for the box office of theatrical animated films.
By sorting out some of the Japanese anime works released in China in the past five years, we found that there is an inevitable relationship between the two.
Especially for anime IPs like "Destiny Night" ("Fate") and "Sword Art Online", which were born after the 21st century, the main fans are gathered in the post-00s group, so the audience portraits of these movies often occupy a large proportion of the post-00s.
corresponds to the animated movie "Slam Dunk" released last year, which allowed many post-80s and post-90s generations to experience the midsummer time of that year.
According to the questionnaire survey we distributed, compared with the proportion of the audience of other IP works, the proportion of the post-00s of "Slam Dunk" has decreased significantly, while the post-70s and post-80s audiences have increased, most of these groups have watched early IPs such as "Doraemon", "Dragon Ball", "Neon Genesis Evangelion", "Detective Conan", but for the new episodes such as "Buried Frilian" and "Spell Return", there is almost no involvement.
Whether it is to see the index or the questionnaire feedback, the post-90s audience prefers the "Digimon" series.
In particular, "Digimon: The Last Evolution", which was released in 2020, became a small dark horse at that time with a box office of 125 million. Before the movie was released, a song "Butterfly" ignited the feelings of countless people. Among the viewers who want to watch the film, nearly eighty percent are post-90s audiences.
Feelings are the key to leveraging the post-90s generation to the "Digimon" series.
In the story of the series, the growth of the first-generation characters is highly favored, which indirectly confirms the reason why Digimon: The Last Evolution, which continues the first-generation story, has a good market response. And "Digimon 02: The First Call", which just met with the audience not long ago, did not continue its feelings, coupled with poor word-of-mouth, resulting in the box office of the film falling far short of expectations.
02. The possibility of breaking the curing circle
From our investigation, we found that old friends of Chinese audiences such as the "Doraemon" series and the "Detective Conan" series are not only loved by the post-80s and post-90s audiences, but also continue from the feelings of the previous generation to the post-00s.
We found that during the release of the theatrical version of this kind of anime IP, the distribution of the number of people who want to watch it is relatively even. In particular, the classic theatrical version of "Detective Conan: The Ghost of Baker Street", which will be re-screened in 2023, wants to see more than half of the crowd is a post-00s, an absolute phenomenal case.
On the one hand, these IPs themselves have a long standby and have not yet ended, "Detective Conan" still maintains the rhythm of weekly updates to this day, and steadily occupies the first place in the daily comic broadcast volume of domestic video playback platforms.
What's more, although the times are different, the emotional experiences experienced in youth can often arouse empathy between different generations.
Almost every ordinary child experiences academic troubles, failure to communicate with parents, and friction with peers...... We all fantasize about the possibilities of time and space, with universal tools to solve problems, and companions who will always be with us. As a result, "Doraemon" can always be "cute" in the hearts of generations of children.
It is undeniable that the cuteness of Doraemon has long made it a must-have emoji in mobile phones of different ages. The same is true for the crayon Xiaoxin with the attribute of "cheap cute".
The super sense of network makes the IP even if the animated series has not been introduced to the video platform in Chinese mainland for a long time, but it is still behind the box office of the theatrical version of "Crayon Xiaoxin: New Dimension! Super Power Armageddon" released in 2023 to break 100 million, and nearly sixty percent of the post-00s are the audience who want to watch the film.
The expansion of the age group not only makes Japanese animated films more and more popular in the Chinese market, but also stimulates the possibility of more animated films. Although in the two-dimensional world, or the Japanese market itself, there is a subdivision of animated films. But for the Chinese public, the essence is still animated films.
At a time when animated films are winning over 100 million yuan, the influx of more and more such animations not only strengthens the cultural exchanges in the pan-circle, but also allows more people to really pay attention to the animated films themselves, driving the attention of Chinese and foreign animations in the follow-up of this market.
Not only that, in the past, survey data shows that the post-00s gradually prefer entertainment, while the post-80s generation also rarely enters the theater because of their family and career.